Pig and farm report PTSD edition

A body in the center of space is exposed on all sides.
~ Derrida

This is a day when guns fly in the yard explosions all around a day when my body ends my body erases itself and my body of work erases itself leaving ghost images. 

I leave ghost images today any time I leave a room my spirit lingers behind because it is damaged. On explosion days I am down the rabbit hole. My dream got stuck in my window when I locked it last night and I haven't been able to open it since I fell asleep and woke to find a spider bite on my left upper thigh a place so tender I rolled in bed to the gun shots ratt-attat-attat-tat tat and thought I had been pierced with a crysknife given my body to science over and over an eight hour shift that rambled on spiders carrying out contracts for my life for my white skin unaccustomed to sun and wearing my mango colored swimsuit days at a time breathing in grappling for light with no idea what to say when company comes company that does not exist and will not if I can help it.

The television left on then 

accidental news a girl chid lifted by a strange woman lifted right up and over a hurricane fence her little dog barking and her grandfather heard the bark ran outside grabbed the girl out of the strange woman's hands pushed her with the stump of an arm he lost in a motorcycle accident the woman who tried to grab the girl is being held for 48 hours and will be let go because no one really believes that women can harm children they hear of it but they don't believe it not really not in their hearts women go to prison for shooting their abusive boyfriends and husbands and husband's girlfriends not for harming children women go to prison for selling drugs and selling their bodies not for harming children not even for grabbing children out of fenced yards and besides the woman had been to church just minutes earlier sure she was escorted out of the church for causing a ruckus but she was at church right? and proper so they will let her go in 48 hours so she can find another child and perhaps an Animal God even the smallest dog body will stop her or perhaps not so she is a woman and everyone knows women aren't capable of harming children especially their own.

I am often rendered speechless by gunfire explosion days. That time I told a therapist about my mother and she said something about my pervert mother that's what she'd boiled it all down to pervert: distort garble vitiate corrupt debauch deprave alter something from its original course corruption of what was first intended. The therapist folded her ears shut when I tried to give her details. She simply could. not. hear. it. Then she told me that my PTST was no big deal.

I become a ghost on explosion days. I am rendered speech less. I told that same therapist about dropping to my knees and crawling into my closet when anyone knocked at my door so I couldn't be seen in its fisheye lens but it's okay everybody does that it's nothing to be concerned with she laughed and said well come on it's funny and I never went back.

I am a great ghost today floating in my mango swimsuit through my house with its giant windows on all the walls so I can see anyone coming from literally miles away and from all angles. The windows that expose nothing from the outside but keep me protected from most things except guns and gunfire and explosions and memories. Today I am a ghost girl bang bang go the guns. Bang bang. Now. Tell me how funny it is that I hide. How hilarious it is that I float through my house on explosive days.

I was snatched by one of my mother's ex-husbands when I was four years old snatched by my blue sweater from my kindergarten playground and my brother barely a year older pulled me back. There has always been danger but it's okay it's nothing to be concerned with just another strange woman leaning over a fence with a toy tambourine on her belt that she rattles and taps to attract babies O babies.

I am going to make a honey poultice and hold it over the spider bite and float for the rest of the day float in and out as ghosts do make myself invisible and small.

Pig and farm report

 

We recuperate today. Holidays should not feel like illness but they do something to get through like a colonoscopy. There is a quiet now in my head and in my house even though the tree shedding in the outer outer room is still lit up.

I am by necessity morphing from a Very Nervous Girl into a Calm Woman because it has been proven to me that stress makes me sick. I rather loved the Very Nervous Girl because she was swift and smart and got a lot of things done and was a fast thinker and could react in a moment's notice to any juggernaut hurtled her way. My body doesn't love the Very Nervous Girl any more. My body loves Calm Woman she who thinks before she speaks looks both ways before crossing the road who keeps her hands and feet inside the ride at all times. 

Out here in the North 48° geography is elastic. Night reverses or doubles itself and if it is not late it will be late soon if I am not diligent diligence being the rudder the bow the shoe's heel. Sometimes it is a memory etched on a sidewalk happy new year floating from my eaves as the starlings shoot out. I have no chart on the proper way of seduction by water the low drone of an airplane fur or deep beds. I'm afraid of dogs running at me but not an ant parade or chemistry's miracles. I have to admit that I am small and helpless with zero raspberry jam a tea set's small flat knife and a rose patterned saucer. You don't have to know me one hot second to know I am not fond of roses or rats or how they are depicted at the end holding the earth's skirt in their teeth. 

Happy Boxing Day Darklings.

Pig and farm report: Christmas Day edition

 

In which my head opens like a peony

I'm watching It’s A Wonderful Life on the television and making waffles for my son and letting the adverts the music wash through me given in to it given up to it it's about allowing myself to feel and once those gates are open all the horses gallop through love fear joy green grass apples rain fog snowmen tinsel memory's dark closets mix up in my body and I become other bodies I become outside myself watching waiting for my early memories to change to an idea of perfect

Thank you for reading here dear Darklings.

Pig and farm report Christmas eve edition

Today is Christmas Eve. I’m sitting at my kitchen table in the dark waiting for the hullabaloo to begin. I have vowed to bake a pumpkin pie (easy as I made the pie shell yesterday) and then make stuffed pasta shells for dinner tomorrow. What I really want to do is read my book walk around outside come back in turn on the little propane fireplace and bake bread. These quiet things. The hullabaloo of holidays which live in my head because my life is quiet these days but noise is there. The noise of gluttony which sounds like spending too much money on gifts and food. The gluttony of hearing about food in movies and on television and the constant going going going. The gluttony of Christmas carols playing loud in stores the gluttony of guilt in me trying to make up for failed holidays past the ones where I was a young single mother trying to make it right for my beautiful boy child. The gluttony of suffering as we relive our terrible family deep secrets the gluttony of sentimentality. The gluttony of religion the gluttony of never enough and always too much. The gluttony of remembering.

The truth is I am not a holiday person I am uncomfortable with all of them. I get weepy and weird and even though I love to cook I hate cooking on government or church sanctioned holidays all of them especially the holidays where people are blowing shit up and shooting guns one of which is coming up real soon because I hide on those holidays as my PTSD rears up and gets bitey. I do however love to bake on almost all of the days except government and church sanctioned holidays especially the goddamn noisy ones. Two days ago I baked my bread for the week and cinnamon rolls and I made bedeviled eggs for my son even though eggs outside of cake or cinnamon rolls are terrifying. Yesterday I made soft pillowy naan for some curry after I went shopping at 8:30 AM to avoid most everyone and I was proud of myself for not having a panic attack or fainting or going off my list and staring at the cheese counter for an hour as my brain swam who knows where. Today I am baking bread again because it is a meditation to me a mantra that calms me measuring and weighing kneading my hands in flour and water and oil and salt the true magic of yeast.

It has been so warm here this winter my rhododendrons are gaining hot pink blooms. I stand out on the deck each morning begging my lilacs to go back go back little green buds are forming all over my forest. Go back buds be merry merry and bright.

Pig and farm report

 

This morning I opened a blister the size of the pad of my right index finger and peeled off the skin which will rehabilitate itself as I rehabilitate myself season after season. It is early I smell of toothpaste and apples. It took me seventy years to be this beautiful the word I most overuse when writing to myself my flying off imperfect self. I am quiet now my legs are white and covered in soft fur because I refuse to ever shave any part of my body again. My hair is French-Canadian from swimming in a bitter river all last summer with milfoil blading up and down my arms. I swam past the upswept roofs of the Water Barons I swam past boats and discarded Christmas trinkets. I floated under the flower bridge under docks under canoes under oxen drinking under girls washing their clothes on rocks. I swam past a bistro painted like Frida Kahlo a well cleaned spigot leading to the mouth of July. I swam naked my chilled legs scissoring like teenage Esther Williams in 1939 at the Los Angeles Athletic Club a million dollar mermaid a femme fatale synchronized and holy in a white swimsuit. 

Once I built a house in my head during deep prana-bindu hypnosis from the foundation up a house where I could conjure people and ideas and spill my fortune or create it a house above the sea that roiled and jumped with dolphins and whales. Eventually that house became this house in all its infinite beauty.

When I was a girl I lived in a house with fireplaces in all the rooms. I was thirteen years old. Not a run-away but thrown out of my mother's house and the house with the fireplaces was not my house. I was a child squatting there with other unhoused and homeless children through a frozen Spokane winter a city known for brutal temperatures. The house was in the industrial section of Spokane a deserted place with boarded up windows and no electricity but there was a wood stove to heat water for sponge baths and cooking and fireplaces in each of the six or seven or eight bedrooms. I lost my virginity (I didn't actually lose it I gave it up willingly) in one of those bedrooms a fire roaring in the grate me wearing my child's white nightgown a ludicrous queasy bride on a bare mattress on a floor the smell of woodsmoke already grown into my skin. Once you are in the business of building fires to survive it's hard to scrub that ash out. I kept my hands in my pockets all the time at school because I was ashamed of the smoke dirt in my fingers crevices.

I don't know why I wrote myself down this path. It has made me shaky and weird. There is something about the season that is both terrible and bright and even with a hollowed out family of origin we still travel there in our heads. The question is how can I jump out of the airplane if I can't even locate a body of water in which to land? 

Robots of my heart rejoice. Your time has come.

in the seventh year

Today is the seventh anniversary of my moving into this green house on this green acre on this green island on this blue planet. I have missed writing to you here. All I can do is start and work my way backward with a scant map. I stepped on a yellow flag in my yard and it lit my shoes. The mermaid weathervane is gone from the roof of the little house on the beach and now the house shivers naked when the wind kicks up. I stepped on the scale that I hide from myself in the bathroom closet and no numbers appeared and I said am I dead? Later that night I fainted and cracked my head open on the tiles and my head bled and bled and my son was here and because there was so much blood he called the ambulance and the ambulance and subsequent hospital visit ate my Christmas. I now have a lumpy red scar on my forehead which I have named Ophelia Beulah-land McDashery. The hospital doctors declared that I had syncope and charged me three thousand dollars immediately for sticking my head together with actual glue. I have been telling doctors that I have syncope for over 40 years but was never believed or just ignored until the hospital declared it. Now it is on my permanent record "Patient faints." I'll be she goat goddamned. Later on I was poisoned by a sprig of rosemary.

Welcome back darklings. I have no idea if anyone will see this. Perhaps not. Now I'm going out into the world because I'm out of coffee. If you find me here I am thrilled. Forgive me my wanderings. I have wanted to return for a long while.

Love
Rebecca